NUMBER OF BIRDS AND TURTLE. 3 



of which the former was left dry at low water. In 

 this lagoon we saw both sharks and turtle swimming 

 about, and there were upwards of thirty fine turtle 

 turned this morning, when the boats first landed. 

 The island was well stocked with birds, of which 

 black noddies and shearwaters were the most abun- 

 dant ; the next in number being terns, gulls, white 

 herons or segrets, oyster-catchers, and curlews. 

 The trees were loaded with the nests of the noddies, 

 each of which was a small platform of sea-weed and 

 earth, fixed in the fork of a branch. They had one 

 rather elongated lightish brown egg, rather less than 

 a hen's egg. The shearwaters burrowed in the 

 ground two or three feet, their eggs were larger, 

 rather pointed and speckled, and streaked with 

 black. Under one tree I found a large green turtle 

 either asleep or dying, as he would not move when 

 I sat down on him, giving only a lazy flap with his 

 hinder flipper occasionally. On the south side of 

 the island, on the beach, were exposed some beds of 

 pretty hard rock, formed of fragments of corals and 

 shells, compacted together in a matrix of still smaller 

 grains of the same material. The beds were thin 

 and slab-like, and rose from out of the lagoon at an 

 angle of about 8°, to a height of six or eight feet 

 above high-water mark. Some of the finer slabs 

 reminded me very much in general appearance of 

 the slabs of the Dudley limestone. The colour of 

 the rock was dark brown, hard externally, but the 

 inside was white and much softer. 



b °2 



